Lets Talk Blog

Not all employers research their potential employees online…yet. The growth of social media means it’s now increasingly easy for employers to access all sorts of information about the personal life of those they are looking to employ.

As of July 2010, the UK had around 26 million Facebook users. Earlier in 2010, research by job search website careerbuilder.co.uk showed 53% of UK employers search for their potential employees online before hiring them.

With a little help from Google or a quick scan of the most popular social media sites, your next employer can access your profile. What do you think they’ll think about those photos you put up yesterday from your Saturday night out on the town?

Now is a great time to be getting into the media and advertising industry. Everyone’s reading, viewing, clicking, watching and commenting on something online. In the UK, 71% of us have access to the internet from home, we’ve watched 5.5 billion videos online in February this year, 26 million of us are registered on Facebook, and 60% of us accessed the internet at least once a day in 2010.

This clearly presents an opportunity for marketers, publishers and businesses to promote their products and services, publish content and to advertise too. With more of us expecting this content to be on demand and there’s already 7.1 million of us accessing it through our smart phones, this trends is only going to continue.

During the recession, organisations have been forced to re-examine their spending, drive down costs and improve efficiencies where ever possible. This has led to contracts being renegotiated and supplier prices being hammered down. This has been an issue for all businesses but in larger organisations the procurement department has been given a greater strategic role and increasingly those that perhaps have had no such area of the business is now looking more seriously. We’re now beginning to see the (continued?) rise of the procurement specialist.

The recent review of government spending by Sir Philip Green, owner of Topshop and Bhs, has provided some damming insight into huge government wastage. This will have a massive impact on any business selling services to the public sector and ultimately, as a business services sales professional your career.

If you want a construction sales job, attitude and preparation is everything! The construction market has no doubt been hit hard by the recession. The number of people on the market rose sharply as businesses went into administration and were forced to make redundancies. This meant lots of candidates, all applying for only a handful of jobs. Companies that were still recruiting had their pick of the crop meaning they were only going to recruit people that fitted their exact requirements.